Information processing systems can be configured to process data from distributed sensors, smart objects, smart appliances, smart automobiles or other types and arrangements of interconnected IoT devices. However, as the number of IoT devices continues to increase, the implementation of IoT-based systems under conventional practice presents a number of significant problems. For example, these systems can be very difficult to scale to increasingly larger number of IoT devices of different types due to the high level of complexity of individual customer use cases. In addition, there are wide variations between different IoT environments across verticals. As a result, IoT-based systems are often deployed as single-vendor solutions that are configured for a particular customer use case within a given vertical, and not readily adaptable to other use cases or verticals. Such arrangements tend to increase the costs of deploying IoT-based systems while also limiting their performance.